ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge/Berg Roll To Victory In Denver By Rob Dinerman

March 5 - Neither the caprice of an experimental new scoring format (in which games went to 11 points, with a clear margin of two from 10-all, rather than the usual 15-point system), nor the visibility issues raised by the altitude-mandated use of the red singles ball (which tended to “whiten up” considerably as it absorbed paint from the walls of the host Denver Athletic Club), nor their participation in a concomitant pro Mixed event with the pro women present for a WDSA (Women’s Doubles Squash Association) Denver tour stop of their own, were able to prevent Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg from garnering their fifth consecutive ISDA ranking title at the Hashim Khan Invitational this past weekend, the longest run of uninterrupted ISDA dominance in the nearly two and a half years since October 2005, when Mudge and Gary Waite notched their 19th straight tour win by taking the 2005-06 season-opening Maryland Club Open. That streak was snapped a few weeks later in the Big Apple Open final by Preston Quick and Ben Gould, whose 15-14 fourth-game win ended the Waite/Mudge run at 64 matches. Quick was on hand for this Denver final as well (to the joy of the club membership, which had seen him learn the game there as a youngster), this time with John Russell as his partner, after they had handily ousted Gould and Paul Price in an 11-6, 6 and 8 semi while Mudge and Berg were similarly winning 3-0 over Clive Leach and Chris Walker in the balancing semifinal. (In fact, all of the eight combined qualifying and main-draw pre-final matches lasted only three games; none went more than an hour, a consequence at least in part of the 11-point format, which was meant to reduce the length of the matches and did so to so great a degree that it is unlikely to resurface going forward.) Russell and Quick, zero for three in their Mudge/Berg tilts this season prior to this Monday-night final in Colorado, elected to enter more of an “attack mode” this time, with substantial success during the middle of the match – after dropping the first game, they won the second, had a 10-9 game-ball opportunity in the third (before a Mudge backhand cross-court forced a Quick tin and keyed a game-saving 3-0 run) and easily took the fourth. In each of those games other than the third, whichever team was able to stake an early-game lead had proceeded to win that game fairly decisively, a possible consequence of the game-changing dynamics of the 11-point system. This pattern would persist in the fifth game as well, with Mudge and Berg jumping out right from the outset and never looking back as they locked up their 11-8 5-11 12-10 6-11 11-4 victory. As noted, there were also both Women’s and Mixed professional draws, both of which were captured by Natalie Grainger and her respective partners, namely Chris Walker in the Mixed (with whom Grainger played the right wall as they defended their ’07 title in a 3-0 final against Price and Narelle Krizek) and Jess Dimauro (with whom Grainger played the left wall) in the Women’s, over Krizek and her sister Natarsha McIlhenny in the final. The Grainger/Dimauro pair have now earned their way into all three WDSA finals in this, its inaugural season, opposing Krizek and her respective partners in each case --- they defeated Krizek and Steph Hewitt 3-1 in Greenwich; lost to Krizek and Demer Holleran 3-1 in Rye; and, as mentioned, defeated Krizek and her doubles-debuting sibling 3-0 in Denver. The ISDA tour, with 12 sanctioned tournaments now in the 2007-08 books, now will take nearly a month off before resuming with the Creek Challenge Cup in Long Island in early April, which will be followed by the Kellner Cup in New York later that month and the season-ending early-May new tour stop in Sea Island, Georgia.

Draw